> When looking at the answers, on average, the Laravel community seems to mostly favor the ease of entry – virtually no learning curve.<p>I wholeheartedly disagree. That's the problem with Laravel. It creates new ways and new syntax for every little thing. It recreates features that PHP already has, which makes things more complicated and less readable.<p>Zend is absolute garbage, but most of the other popular PHP frameworks are fine. In fact, a lot of the value of any particular framework is how many other people use it. But Laravel does have a big learning curve because it is so opinionated and reinvents so many wheels.<p>For experienced devs starting new projects, I'd suggest hooking libraries together using Composer. For experienced devs with enough time on their hands, I'd suggest moving on to something else (I'm most excited about Hack, but Python is more mature).